Where Web Services Are Going
Pages: 1, 2, 3

Loukides: Now, as far as reliable messaging, it seems to me that one of the things that's made SOAP attractive so far has been in fact that it doesn't have reliable messaging. You know, when you throw in reliable messaging, you up the ante, probably about a factor of 10 just in terms of the protocol support and the service support. In fact, actually, you turn SOAP into JMS.

Bosworth: Well, there's no doubt that's what you're doing. I don't want to beat around the bush. You're basically turning the Internet into a messaging backbone.

Loukides: Yes.

Bosworth: I'm not going to deny that. At the same time, most of the B2B customers I talk to actually see themselves as being stymied without that. So at least in the B2B area, a lot of the companies I talk to are just using a VPN and tunnelling queuing straight through it.

But honestly, I think it's going to come. I think you're going to see the Internet become a messaging network, not just a request-response network. To some degree, it already is; it's called mail. But mail's a little bit different, right? And we don't have some of the required delivery characteristics that we're going to have here. I understand the appeal. You know, if the Dave Winers of the world are going to say, "Oh, jeez, you've already made it too heavyweight with WSDL, now you've added in the protocol requirements for reliable messaging. I don't need that to talk to Frontier UserLand, and why are you doing this?" It has to be done so if you don't need it, you don't have to pay the price. But when I talk to the customers out there doing B2B, that's what they want. Right now, when they go out and buy an installation so they can go and talk to their business partner, they get a quote of $130,000 just to get started, and their immediate reaction is, "Why can't I just use Web services to do this and buy something a lot cheaper?"

Loukides: And the answer to that right now is that you don't have reliability and you're going to lose, you know, one message out of a thousand ... 0

Bosworth: Exactly, exactly. But I'm predicting that's going to get fixed, courtesy of the fact that we're all working very closely together. You're going to see very rapid evolution of SOAP in this direction, and a lot of specs very, very quickly come up to speed to do this. My personal opinion is you'll see the B2B stuff ready for prime time by the end of the year.

Loukides: : OK. That'll be pretty impressive.

Bosworth: Well, time will tell if I was too aggressive or not. I've been too aggresive in the past, but in this case, I talk to my colleagues at Microsoft and IBM and we're pretty determined to move this through quickly. If I had to predict, what does Web services do this year, I think on application integration we move from early adopter to mainstream by the end of the year. And B2B is going to be faster than people think.